His advice: “We should all just wash our hands and go to the doctor if we have flu symptoms.” Er, wrong. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (area of expertise: public health):

If you get sick with influenza, CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them.

CDC is happy for people to contact their doctor if they need advice, but it only recommends adults seek emergency medical treatment if they have: (i) Difficulty breathing or shortness of breath; (ii) Pain or pressure in the chest or abdomen; (iii) Sudden dizziness; (iv) Confusion; (v) Severe or persistent vomiting. (The advice for children is similar – the list of warning symptoms different.)

In the UK, health authorities are even more explicit about the fact they don’t want people with flu sitting around in doctor’s waiting rooms. “If you have flu-like symptoms and have recently travelled to Mexico or been in contact with someone who has, stay at home and contact either your GP or NHS Direct on 0845 4647,” advises the NHS. Treating people without requiring face-to-face contact with healthcare professionals is at the heart of of the UK’s pandemic flu plan.

Carafano’s sins are minor compared with this preposterous Guardian article by Simon Jenkins (core expertise: frothing at the mouth).  According to Jenkins, swine flu is “a panic stoked in order to posture and spend” – with the public too moronic to resist having the wool pulled over its eyes:

We appear to have lost all ability to judge risk. The cause may lie in the national curriculum, the decline of “news” or the rise of blogs and concomitant, unmediated hysteria, but people seem helpless in navigating the gulf that separates public information from their daily round.

The government was “barking mad” to convene its emergency planning committee, Jenkins argues, while the World Health Organization is not really worried – it’s just making a pathetic bid to shore up its funding. Attention-whore doctors, health and safety hysterics, and rapacious drugs companies are all in on the plot, while ‘professional expertise’ (presumably from shrinking violent newspaper columnists) is being completely ignored.

BSE, SARs and avian flu, meanwhile, provide cast iron assurance that no pandemic is on the way.

What Carrafano, to his credit, understands, but Jenkins and his ilk refuse to accept, is that risks are risky, precisely because, for a long period, we simply don’t know how serious they are. This creates a huge quandary for governments. Anthony Giddens capture the tension well in his 1999 Reith Lecture:

There is a new moral climate of politics, marked by a push-and-pull between accusations of scaremongering on the one hand, and of cover-ups on the other. If anyone – government official, scientific expert or researcher – takes a given risk seriously, he or she must proclaim it. It must be widely publicised because people must be persuaded that the risk is real – a fuss must be made about it. Yet if a fuss is indeed created and the risk turns out to be minimal, those involved will be accused of scaremongering.

Suppose, on the other hand, that the authorities initially decide that the risk is not very great, as the British government did in the case of contaminated beef [early in the BSE scare]. In this instance, the government first of all said: we’ve got the backing of scientists here; there isn’t a significant risk, we can continue eating beef without any worries. In such situations, if events turn out otherwise – as in fact they did – the authorities will be accused of a cover-up – as indeed they were.

Being grown up about risk means planning in conditions of uncertainty – not allowing policy to be driven by Simon Jenkins and other petulant pub bores. His article may be one step up from the conspiracy theories I was tracking over the weekend – but that’s not saying very much…

So how would such a map look if used to plot the spread of a pandemic today, Kedrosky wonders? Well:

there would be similarities, of course, but there would also be big differences. Instead of contiguous, banded advance you would see viruses hurled ahead of the index cases by air travel, like spot fires a mile ahead of a Santa Ana-driven wildfire. Instead of bands you would have clusters and jumps, mostly corresponding to airline disease vectors. And instead of four years to travel through a corner of the known world, you would have the virus around the world in four days, as is the case today with this H1N1 swine outbreak.

Interesting coda: in comments, Matt Dubuque notes that when the Black Death wiped out a significant chunk of the English labour force in 1340, remaining agricultural labourers were able to crank their wage rates sky high. Presto! – major resource transfer from rich to poor.

1. Swine flu will spread globally. The only question is whether it will be a mild flu or a severe one. It could still go either way. My best guess would be that it will be bad, but not mass-death-1918 pandemic bad.

2. If you want to routinely protect yourself from swine flu, wash your hands every single time you enter a building with facilities to wash. This means when you go into your house, your office, a restaurant, a bar, whatever. Carry hand sanitizer, and disinfect your hands before eating if you are away from home and can’t wash your hands right before. Do not kiss your friends hello. Don’t share food, or eat the unwrapped mints from that bowl in the foyer of the Italian restaurant down the street. Now would be a very good time to quit biting your nails.

3. If your city sees an outbreak of swine flu, avoid crowds. Don’t take public transport, or attend public events like concerts or sports games. Limit your social contact by reducing your shopping trips to once a week. Wearing a mask is overkill unless your local health department recommends it.

4. If you have flu symptoms, stay home. Call your doctor, and describe your symptoms. She will decide if you need to go to a hospital. (Do NOT go straight to an emergency room.) Don’t go to school or work. If you do have to go out (like you live alone and need food), wear a mask and choose a time that minimizes human contact. Avoid contact with the people in your house. Cover your mouth when coughing or sneezing, and use paper tissues and flush them once they are used. Clean surfaces like doorknobs with a regular cleaner, like Lysol.

5. If you are genuinely terrified of bodies-in-the-streets mass public health hysteria, then prepare. It will make you feel better, and in the unlikely event your worst fears come true, it will help. If you can afford them, emergency supplies are always good to have. Any number of websites can help you make a plan. The CDC is a good place to start.

To which I’d add: if you do live alone, then you’re more vulnerable and you need to be thinking ahead.  The vulnerability here is less to infection per se than just the lack of backup: someone to go and get your Tamiflu from the chemist, or to get some food in for you.

So as Charlie recounts in his excellent new pamphlet Resilient Nation, the kind of preparation you really need to be thinking about is less a cupboard full of Tamiflu or a cellar full of canned food than a social network you can rely on.  So if / when you get to the point when infection rates are rising in your area, then agree to buddy up with friends and check on each other regularly. Swap phone numbers with your neighbours, so that if one of you falls ill then you can keep in touch without sneezing all over each other. Think about who else might need help in your circle or on your street.

Yes – the first swine flu conspiracy theories are hitting the Internets, providing a rare opportunity to view these numb skull paranoids as they struggle to assemble a few fragments of information into a suitably cunning plot.

Here’s how it goes:

Evidence: The flu virus is reported to combine “genetic material from pigs, birds and humans in a way researchers have not seen before.” Implication: the virus was probably deliberately released.

Evidence:  ”In all U.S. cases, the victims had no contact with any pigs.” Implication: Pigs are evil… er they caught it from other people… er pigs never had anything to do with it.

Evidence: A public health official says: “This strain of swine influenza that’s been cultured in a laboratory is something that’s not been seen anywhere [before].” Implication: The poor guy wasn’t referring to standard identification techniques, but letting slip vital details of a dastardly scheme. WE TOLD YOU IT WAS DELIBERATELY RELEASED.

Evidence: The world has huge stock piles of Tamiflu. “Top globalists and Bilderberg members like George Shultz, Lodewijk J.R. de Vink and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld” have a financial interest in Tamiflu. Implication: THEY’RE BEHIND THE ATTACK.

Evidence: The 1976 swine flu scare didn’t add up to much. Implication: RUMSFELD WAS BEHIND THAT TOO.

Now I am sure the story will become more polished as additional information is available to be distorted. But remember. This is how it started. And this is how little evidence these cretins need to start spinning their fantasies…

Update: Mike Adams, editor of Natural News, chimes in with one of the great rhetorical questions of all time:

Could world governments, spooked by the prospect of radical climate change caused by over-population of the planet, have assembled a super-secret task force to engineer and distribute a super virulent strain of influenza designed to “correct” the human population (and institute global Martial Law)?

Er – probably not Mike.

Update II: OMYGOODGOD  the plot is really thickening… As Dan O’Huiginn points out in the comments, the spiciest nutjob theory is that swine flu was “a high tech assassination attempt on President Obama.” Robert Wenzel is one of many pushing this fantasy:

During President Obama’s recent trip to Mexico, Obama was received at Mexico’s anthropology museum in Mexico City by Felipe Solis, a distinguished archaeologist who died the following day from symptoms similar to flu…

Clearly, if the man died the next day, he was highly contagious when Obama met him, and could have infected Obama easily. That, it appears, he didn’t infect Obama could just be a matter of luck for Obama.

Some reports say Solis died of a heart attack (an obvious cover up), others that he may have been an innocent victim of the flu (what idiot would believe that?).  Wenzel knows better:

They keep Obama in a bubble. I see the way he travels around D.C. I would think it’s pretty near impossible for a gunman to get to Obama (unless it is someone already around him who has a gun– a guard losing it type thing) But sophisticated planners, who can do the hit through a third person who will have the virus and will be able to pass through security, while the real perpetrators are not even at the scene, that could only be executed by very serious players.

Keep this in mind. The population of Mexico City, where Obama was greeted by Solis, is roughly 8.8 million people. If we assume all the 1,000 reported cases of the flu in Mexico are in Mexico City, the odds of any specific person in Mexico City having the virus is .0125%. And this guy ends up greeting the President, when he is highly contagious? It’s investigation time.

Update III: Now we’ve got a witness!!! Granted we don’t even know his name, but the conspiracy case is beginning to look pretty watertight:

Guys, you’re the only ones i can tell about this. Be careful who you inform.

I’m a trucker with a stellar record, and I’ve been getting bigger and bigger transport jobs from the government over the years. The job’s been good to me, as I do not have to interact with anyone when I’m on the job, and most people stay away from me because they assume I’m dumb as a sack of bricks. I don’t mind, since I don’t like people.

Two weeks ago I finished transporting some biohazard-labeled sealed boxes to the Pentagon. After an armed escort met me at the loading dock, they told me to wait in truck until someone arrived with a check. These people weren’t the govt workers I knew and interacted with regularly, so they didn’t know that I wasn’t the average retarded truck driver. They didn’t think I had enough curiosity to wander around a bit, as I always do.

I saw the boxes from my truck opened and lying discarded in a room right by the dock. The contents were gone, but a sheet of paper with Pentagon letterhead was still lying inside. Half a page down was the heading “H1N1 phase I – probability of success by epicenter.” At the top of the list was Mexico City, followed by Los Angeles, New York, Houston, and Singapore(?). Not being retarded, I remembered enough of what I read to jar my memory when the first reports came out. Wherever you are, be careful – there are powers and interests here far more dangerous than you imagine.

Update IV: Via Twitter, Mark Borkowski tunes in. ‘Who?’ you ask. Mark Borkowski. A man whose ‘face is known to millions’, who TV producers turn to whenever they need ‘authoritative comment on scandals, celebrity and the media itself’, and the guy who Eddie Izzard, Graham Norton, Joan Rivers, Macaulay Culkin, Sir Cliff Richard, Shirley Bassey, and the Bolshoi Ballet rely on to protect their various reputations.

Borkowski (who I met once, and is a thoroughly nice guy) is working on “a hunch that the swine flu panic iis [sic] stirred up by a US PR company to help the development and manufacture of a dodgy vaccine.” And yes, he’s deadly serious. When questioned, he reveals that “some dark uber lord with a pharma account” is behind it all. Will keep you in touch as the PR legend’s investigation develops…

Update V: The mysterious trucker popped up on March 30 in a slightly different guise in a call to radio show The Power Hour. Unfortunately the caller can’t reveal where she got her information: “What I am saying has already put me in danger.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Update VI: I was naive in my initial premise that swine flu conspiracy theories were born de novo over the weekend. Of course, these memes have been incubating throughout the period in which avian flu has been in the news. The new theories also grow from old anxieties about government-sponsored vaccination programmmes. More on this later, maybe. 

For now, and as a last update to this post, many of the conspiracy theorists believe that the 1918/1919 pandemic was the result of a US biowarfare programme. Why? Because the Nazis said so:

In 1948 Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo, told his CIA Interrogator that the most devastating plague in human history was man-made. 

He was referring to the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 that infected 20% of the world’s population and killed between 60 and 100 million people. This is roughly three times as many as were killed and wounded in World War One, and is comparable to WWII losses, yet this modern plague has slipped down the memory hole.

Mueller said the flu started as a US army bacteriological warfare weapon that somehow infected US army ranks at Camp Riley KS in March 1918, and spread around the world. He says that it “got out of control” but we cannot discount the horrible possibility that the “Spanish Flu” was a deliberate elite depopulation measure, and that it could be used again. Researchers have found connections between it and the “Bird Flu.”

Update VII: OK -a few more updates. Why are only Mexicans dying? Because the ‘weaponized virus’ has been deliberately engineered to target Hispanics.

Update VIII: Now it’s settling down, the key ingredients in the conspiracy ‘theory seem to be:

Governments have form - most big epidemics are government-sponsored attacks. 1918/19 flu, foot and mouth, HIV – all weaponized viruses.

Governments have motive - the New World Order is engaged in a war with humanity. An epidemic – with associated ‘dark winter’ as basic services are withdrawn – will allow globalists to make their move, creating world government etc.

Business has motive too – this is a chance to sell lots of vaccines and anti-virals. Plus businesses are also controlled by globalists and are committed to the New World Order.

Swine flu is clearly weaponized - the obvious signs are (i) an unusual mix of human, pig and bird viruses – couldn’t happen in nature; (ii) simultaneous release across multiple sites – too quick for ‘ordinary’ transmission; (iii) various scientists etc. have confirmed the virus is manmade, though they’re being hushed up; (iv) eye witnesses are desperately trying to get information out about the plot, at real danger to their lives.

Something very bad is going to happen – Four things could be going on, in ascending levels of scariness: (i) This is a ‘beta test’ – a trial balloon. (ii) This is a pretext to mass vaccinate people with a poisonous vaccine. (iii) The take over by the globalists is beginning. Prepare for a world police state; (iv) A massive cull of the population is underway (80% or so) – to create a world that’s much easier to control.